In model-driven development approaches, process models are used at different levels of abstraction and are described by different languages. Similar to other software artifacts, process models are developed in team environments and underlie constant change. This requires reusable techniques for the detection of changes between different process models and the computation of dependencies and con...

One of the greatest conundrums in semiotics and linguistics is explaining why change occurs in communication systems. The descriptive apparatus of how change occurs has been developed in great detail since at least the nineteenth century, but a viable explanatory framework of why it occurs in the first place still seems to be clouded in vagueness. So far, only the so-called Principle of Least E...

1 Kie Zuraw 0. Introduction Why do languages change? If children are able to infer surrounding adults' grammatical systems from their utterances, and if adults adjust their lexicons and perhaps grammars to achieve better communication with their interlocutors, any linguistic innovations that might somehow arise should be quickly stamped out. This is a combination of Weinreich et al.'s (1968) " ...

Probabilistic Models of Evolution and Language Change

Crowdsourcing linguistic phenomena with smartphone applications is relatively new. In linguistics, apps have predominantly been developed to create pronunciation dictionaries, to train acoustic models, and to archive endangered languages. This paper presents the first account of how apps can be used to collect data suitable for documenting language change: we created an app, Dialäkt Äpp (DÄ), w...

We present a mathematical formulation of a theory of language change. The theory is evolutionary in nature and has close analogies with theories of population genetics. The mathematical structure we construct similarly has correspondences with the Fisher-Wright model of population genetics, but there are significant differences. The continuous time formulation of the model is expressed in terms...

6 No direct evidence remains from before the emergence of writing 7 systems to inform theories about the evolution of language. Only 8 as evidence is amassed from many different disciplines can theo9 rizing about the evolution of language be sufficiently constrained 10 to remove it from the realm of pure speculation and allow it to 11 become an area of legitimate scientific inquiry. To go beyon...

Studies of language change have begun to contribute to answering several pressing questions in cognitive sciences, including the origins of human language capacity, the social construction of cognition and the mechanisms underlying culture change in general. Here, we describe recent advances within a new emerging framework for the study of language change, one that models such change as an evol...

Previous empirical studies of population size and language change have produced equivocal results. We therefore address the question with a new set of lexical data from nearly one-half of the world's languages. We first show that relative population sizes of modern languages can be extrapolated to ancestral languages, albeit with diminishing accuracy, up to several thousand years into the past....

Climate change communication has become a salient topic in science and society. It has grown to be something like a booming industry alongside more established ‘communication enterprises’, such as health communication, risk communication, and science communication. This article situates the theory of climate change communication within theoretical developments in the field of science communicat...